Obama's Health Plan: Far Short Of A Cure

June 03, 2007|By BILL CURRY Bill Curry, former counselor to President Bill Clinton, was the Democratic nominee for governor twice. His column appears Sundays. He can be reached at billcurryct@gmail.com

I've told this story a million or so times: A missionary standing by a river sees a body float by. She pulls it in. More float by. Some are alive. She wades in and out, buries the dead, nurses the sick, teaches the children. The story's point becomes clear -- what she's doing is all good, but one day you have to walk up the river and see where all the bodies are coming from.

It's a parable for liberals. A liberal government is like that missionary -- always cleaning up the carnage after the fact, never going to the source to fix what's wrong. The work is noble -- surely we must minister to the afflicted -- but in the end futile and expensive, sucking up tax dollars every year to ply the margins of problems we never solve.

I thought of this while thumbing through Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's new health care plan. (I do it so you won't have to.) The first thing to say about it may be said of every Democratic plan -- it sure beats what we've got now.

There are some very good parts. Like John Edwards, Obama offers small business and the self-employed a government option modeled on the federal employee health plan. Like Hillary Clinton, he wants to cut costs. Like Clinton and Edwards, he stresses prevention and wellness. Like any real Democrat, he'd cover every child in America.

Some parts aren't so good. Because he keeps our patchwork of government, private insurer and employer-based plans, he won't get his projected savings. He calls his plan ``universal,'' but unlike Edwards or even Mitt Romney, he doesn't make anyone join. A rosy estimate is he'd leave 15 million people uninsured; the real number may be closer to 30 million.

Obama claims his plan ``reduces every family's premium by as much as $2,500.'' The key phrase is ``as much as,'' which means one family can get $2,500 and everyone else bupkus. A universal plan could cut an average family's cost $1,500, but you have to junk the old system to get there. Obama won't do it.

One component of the plan is a ``National Health Insurance Exchange'' to ``reform the private insurance market'' through tougher regulation. Good luck. The idea's based on a German model, but Obama can't admit that lest he be accused of learning from another country's experience. No matter. Insurers don't have to join, so you can bet they won't.

Obama also supports a federal reinsurance program. Under it, taxpayers reimburse insurers for the costliest care. This concept dates back to the ``catastrophic health care'' bill authored by Sens. Abe Ribicoff and Russell Long in the 1960s, which was deemed inadequate then. It resurfaced in 2004 as John Kerry's big idea and sank like a stone.

Insurers want it badly. Ponder the brazenness of these secret socialists. They want us to insure them against the cost of catastrophic care. Wow. Taxpayers already insure the old and the poor, and soon most children. We should now pay for any care that costs a lot, leaving insurers to cover who? Fitness fanatics with trust funds?

Ironically, Obama repeats Hillary Clinton's fatal mistake of years ago. To appease industry and the conventional wisdom, her 1994 plan retained every scrap of the old system while larding on even more bureaucracy. The resultant complexity and expense spooked a nervous public, handing lobbyists all the ammunition they needed to gun it down.

We once debated whether to cut costs for the middle class or extend coverage to the uninsured. We now know that to extend coverage we must cut costs. We can't do either unless we first admit that the old system needs not just reforming but replacing.

Barack Obama talks eloquently of bringing us together. But we get along better in real life than we do in politics or on television. A person can worry so much about our divisions he avoids hard choices for fear of dividing us further. It happens a lot around elections. There's no time for it now.

The health insurance industry survives on a taxpayer-funded resuscitator. It must now get up and walk or gracefully expire. In politics, taking a walk up the river means facing hard choices. We need a president who puts hard choices on the table. Obama has shown us a lot to like. But he has yet to show us he can do that.